Tech left teens fighting over scraps, and now it wants those too

Right now, there are robots stocking the shelves of convenience stores in Japan. We haven’t embraced this technology here in America yet, but it’s hard to imagine September 11 or at least Walmart not trying it soon. Walmart ditched its shelf-scanning robots in 2020, but machine vision and AI have improved so much in the past five years, it’s only a matter of time before it becomes a machine refilling that row of family-sized Fruity Pebbles and not a kid earning some extra cash during their senior year of high school.

The truth is that there are not many jobs for teenagers anymore, and most have simply chosen to take themselves out of the job market. In August 2000, 52.3% of Americans ages 16 to 19 were active in the labor force. In August 2025, that number was only 34.8 percent.

There are a lot of reasons for this (most of which boil down to “technology”), but regardless of the reason, it’s bad for everyone.

First and foremost, no one benefits from having a robot flip your burger instead of a human. Well, no one except those who invested in RoboBurgers.AI. As Harry Holzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, points out, automation “shifts compensation from workers to employers, who enjoy higher profits with less need for labor.” As a customer, you’re getting a product that’s not demonstrably better or more reliable than what a 17-year-old goth kid can offer. You won’t get it any cheaper either, and if there’s another AWS outage, you may not get anything at all.

Just as importantly, teens are missing out on valuable experience during some of the most formative years of their lives. Learning how to juggle job responsibilities, navigate the workplace, and develop basic financial literacy skills becomes more difficult as you get older. They will arrive in the workforce with less experience under their belt, without having been able to test run with a difficult boss in a low-risk job at Dairy Queen.

Automation doesn’t actually improve productivity much, but mostly creates income inequality by displacing low-skilled workers, says Daron Acemoglu, an economist at MIT. Automation has eroded manufacturing and warehouse jobs, pushing adults who typically work these jobs into fields traditionally reserved for younger workers, such as retail, food delivery, and even paper routes. The average age of a retail worker in the United States in 2024 was 38.7 years. In apparel retail specifically, which deviates significantly from retail as a whole, it was 33, up significantly from 29.3 in 2015.

Now that adults are delivering pizza to supplement their stagnant wages and try to keep up with rising prices, robots are coming for these jobs, too. It wasn’t enough for 17-year-olds with driver’s licenses to be pushed out of the delivery market by Uber Eats and DoorDash, where, depending on the state you live in, you may need to be 21 to deliver Chinese takeout to hungry families. Now, these two companies are working on using autonomous robots to deliver food in the United States.

Although I may sound like a noob, I’m not interested in having a self-driving cooler arrive at my door to bring me sushi — I don’t see any benefit to me as a consumer. There is no glitch in the current system that the robot will fix. Plus, I’ll never have to worry about the salmon and avocado wrap inside my delivery driver’s 2012 Prius getting ruined due to a firmware update and spotty cell reception.

Stocking shelves, scooping ice cream, flipping burgers, and delivering takeout are not glamorous jobs. But it was the kind that gave young people and teenagers their first taste of independence. They provided valuable lessons in budget management and taught them important interpersonal skills. But the indirect effects of online shopping, automation, and digital media have largely pushed them out of the job market.

Teenagers have voluntarily taken themselves out of the labor market because they are forced to fight for an ever-shrinking pool of jobs with a growing pool of workers. Now, we’re training robots to take what little scraps are left. Even packing groceries is not safe.